Washington Brief: Senate Confirms Sessions as Attorney General

Washington Brief

In a near-party line vote, the Senate voted Wednesday to confirm Jeff Sessions to be President Donald Trump’s attorney general. Next up? Rep. Tom Price for secretary of Health and Human Services. (The New York Times)

As Senate Democrats consider whether to block all things Trump, their base is with them, but the American people are not, according to a poll. (Morning Consult)

House Democrats finished the first day of their retreat in Baltimore defending their relevancy in the era of Republican-controlled government. (The Baltimore Sun)

Trump is set to meet with airline leaders today amid uncertainty about his travel ban. The aviation industry lacks a unified approach to the new administration. (The Wall Street Journal)

General

Yemen’s simmering war is getting fresh attention from Washington—to the delight of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, hopeful that President Donald Trump will choose the conflict as his first battleground to roll back Iran. Saudi Arabia and other monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council have been fighting in Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to restore President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, ousted that year by the pro-Iranian Houthi militia.

A powerful, fast-moving storm swept through the northeastern U.S. early Thursday, making for a slippery morning commute and leaving some residents bracing for blizzard conditions and more than a foot of snow. Commuters in the densely populated region awoke to windblown snow — less than 24 hours after enjoying spring-like temperatures — and faced slick highways.

Germany’s exports exceeded its imports by the widest yearly margin on record last year, a sign of the strength of Europe’s biggest economy that could inflame tensions between Washington and Berlin over their trade relations. Germany’s trade surplus—or the balance of exports and imports of goods—rose to €252.9 billion ($270.58 billion), marking the highest surplus since records began after World War II, the statistics body said Thursday.

Presidential

President Trump has sent a letter to his Chinese counterpart saying he looked forward to developing a “constructive relationship” with Beijing, the latest in a series of conciliatory signals by the new administration after months of heated rhetoric aimed at America’s largest trading partner. The letter, dated Wednesday, also thanked China’s president, Xi Jinping, for a message he sent congratulating Mr. Trump on his inauguration and conveyed wishes to the Chinese people for the Lunar New Year, the White House said in a two-sentence statement.

U.S. aviation leaders are set to meet President Donald Trump on Thursday amid disagreement over terms granted to some foreign carriers and uncertainty over the administration’s travel ban on citizens of seven nations. Chief executives from passenger and cargo airlines as well as operators of many U.S. airports are expected to attend the meeting, people familiar with the matter said.

Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, privately expressed dismay on Wednesday over Mr. Trump’s increasingly aggressive attacks on the judiciary, calling the president’s criticism of independent judges “demoralizing” and “disheartening.” The remarks by Judge Gorsuch, chosen by Mr. Trump last week to serve on the nation’s highest court, came as the president lashed out at the federal appellate judges who are considering a challenge to his executive order banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

As President Trump’s new Pentagon chief, Jim Mattis has a long list of tasks ahead, including devising a more aggressive campaign to combat the Islamic State and restoring military readiness after years of budget cuts. But a few weeks into his tenure, the retired general’s most visible role has been of a different sort: soothing Americans and allies unnerved by the president and some of his top advisers.

Europe has spent the years since the financial crash constructing an edifice of regulation to curb excessive risk-taking by banks and other financial institutions. With the last bricks almost in place, two factors threaten to bring the building down: Donald Trump and Brexit.

President Donald Trump is injecting himself into the daily business of U.S. companies to an unprecedented extent, spurring investors and executives to weigh their exposure to his wrath when making decisions. The latest was Nordstrom Inc., which drew Trump’s public anger on Twitter Wednesday for discontinuing his daughter Ivanka’s line, saying sales had slumped.

Senate

Senator Jeff Sessions was confirmed on Wednesday as President Trump’s attorney general, capping a bitter and racially charged nomination battle that crested with the procedural silencing of a leading Democrat, Senator Elizabeth Warren. Mr. Sessions, an Alabama Republican, survived a near-party-line vote, 52 to 47, in the latest sign of the extreme partisanship at play as Mr. Trump strains to install his cabinet.

Put Chuck Schumer and Donald Trump in a room together and you can’t miss the connection. They are the leaders of rival parties, sharp opponents on Twitter and in the press, but they live by the same words, as big and bold as the city that made them.

Carly Fiorina, the former GOP presidential candidate, is considering challenging Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) next year. Her comments on a Portsmouth-based radio show popular among party activists marks the first time that the Fairfax resident has spoken publicly about getting back into politics since the November election.

Although there is plenty of anxiety in Washington about the shaky early performance of the Trump administration, don’t count Senator Mitch McConnell among the hand wringers. Mr. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican and the majority leader, says he and his Senate Republican colleagues are quite satisfied with the Trump team so far.

America got a civics lesson Tuesday night when Senate Republicans used an obscure rule to shut down a speech by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., that criticized Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., the nominee for attorney general. Republicans took issue when Warren quoted from a pair of letters written by the late Coretta Scott King and the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., opposing Sessions’s ill-fated nomination to a federal judgeship in 1986.

House

The House subcommittee in charge of shaping telecommunications policy will let the Federal Communications Commission make the first move on rolling back net neutrality rules, the panel’s chairman said Wednesday. “Let’s let the FCC go in and do what they are able to do, make the first move on that, and then we’ll be able to revisit that situation,” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, head of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, told reporters at a briefing on Capitol Hill.

House Democrats opened their annual issues retreat in Baltimore on Wednesday by vowing to aggressively fight President Donald Trump, slamming his first weeks in the White House and suggesting there would be little room for compromise. In a barrage of criticism, Democratic leaders meeting at an Inner Harbor hotel used “illusionist” and “authoritarian regime” to describe Trump.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan sits down with Judy Woodruff for an extended interview. They discuss Ryan’s relationship with President Trump, why he would never support a Muslim ban, finding common purpose with Steve Bannon, why he thinks restarting a relationship with Russia won’t work, plus Republican plans for tax reform, health care, infrastructure and more.

The chairman of the House Freedom Caucus said he would be open to making payments to insurers in 2018, agreeing to support a provision of Obamacare over which House Republicans had sued the Obama administration. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said he may be open to funding the reinsurance and cost-sharing reduction payments under the Affordable Care Act during a short-term transition period away from the health care law toward a more conservative alternative.

States

Democratic businessman Chris Kennedy entered the Illinois governor’s race Wednesday, assailing Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner for “destroying” the state’s economy and failing to lead state government out of its financial mess. “I think Gov. Rauner’s taken a state government budget problem and turned it into economic chaos for the rest of the state. I don’t think it needed to go that way. And I think it’s fixable,” said Kennedy, 53, the son of the slain Democratic liberal icon Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan uses his Facebook page to share his cancer journey, promote his agenda and, at times, urge voters to contact Democratic lawmakers who oppose him. The Republican also uses the social media platform to quiet his critics.

A three-judge state court panel in North Carolina on Tuesday held up part of a new Republican-backed law that strips important power from the newly elected Democratic governor. The ruling, temporarily halting the requirement that the governor seek legislative approval for his cabinet selections, escalated the partisan tensions that have shaken up the state, and came shortly before a scheduled State Senate hearing on one of Gov. Roy Cooper’s cabinet picks.

Advocacy

President Donald Trump is likely to tap two veteran lobbyists to advise on energy and environmental issues in the White House, according to multiple people close to the new administration, filling key roles with longtime Washington experts. Michael Catanzaro, a lobbyist at CGCN Group, is likely to be tapped to cover domestic energy issues, and George David Banks, executive vice president at conservative nonprofit American Council for Capital Formation who was an early supporter of Mr. Trump, is expected to lead global energy and environmental issues.

Harvard spent over half a million dollars lobbying the federal government in 2016, a number that has held relatively steady for the past five years. The University’s Federal Relations Office shelled out $550,000 last year—up $10,000 from 2015—lobbying Congress on legislation related to immigration, science research funding, Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and financial aid, according to public records filed with Congress.

Opinions, Editorials and Perspectives

Among global public health advocates, there is a growing concern that President Trump may cut back, or even eliminate, programs that have played a critical role in fighting diseases worldwide. While every administration should strongly review our nation’s overseas commitments, and there are undoubtedly programs that we should cut, I hope he recognizes the success and importance of one in particular: the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

The disastrous roll out of President Donald Trump’s clampdown on refugees and visitors from majority-Muslim countries wasn’t how his supporters were expecting his administration to begin. While it was a cornerstone of his election campaign, it was poorly thought out, with little consideration given to the inevitable legal challenges, protests and political backlash.

The Obama presidency placed no greater burden on America’s growth potential than the avalanche of regulations that smother the U.S. economic system. The most destructive and dangerous of the new regulatory bureaucracies created by the Democrat-dominated 111th Congress is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

There’s text and then there’s context. Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru’s cover essay on nationalism in the current issue is controversial more because of the context than because of the text itself. Self-avowed nationalists are in the saddle across the West — including in the West Wing.

Research Reports and Polling

Senate Democrats have been nearly united in their opposition to President Donald Trump’s most controversial nominees, but a question remains about how the minority caucus plans to proceed once the chamber moves past the confirmation battles. A new Morning Consult/POLITICO poll found that among Democratic voters, 56 percent say their party should stick to its principles against Trump, even if it means blocking all legislation and nominees.